We Need to Talk about Fashion

What does fashion mean to you? What role does clothing play in your life? Do you see it as a tool to rebel or to associate with something? Do you follow contemporary fashion closely, or are you more nostalgic for the past? Do you think about themes such as sustainability, overconsumption and exploitation? Are you concerned with issues such as body shaming and exclusion? Or do you simply enjoy beautiful and interestingly made clothing?

With these questions, Modemuseum Hasselt will enter into a dialogue with you, with experts, but also with itself in the new exhibition We Need to Talk about Fashion. Using various themes, a hundred recently acquired collection items will be subjected to various questions and placed in a new light. How do we interpret a nineteenth-century cotton dress, an eighteenth-century embroidered men’s jacket, or a party dress from the 1920s with all kinds of decorative motifs today? Or how do we experience transparent dresses, short tops, sweaters with holes, coats made of fur and animal skin, and garments with striking or subtle logos?

The way in which fashion and clothing are experienced is strongly dependent on the zeitgeist. Fashion is constantly changing, as is our perception of this fascinating phenomenon. In an evolving society, fashion acquires new meanings, raises other questions and elicits unknown feelings. These changing attitudes and insights about fashion and clothing are central to the themes of We Need to Talk about Fashion, which are conceived as topics of conversation:

We Need to Talk about Fashion
We Need to Talk about Resistance
We Need to Talk about Honesty We Need
to Talk about Nostalgia
We Need to Talk about Pleasure

Contemporary insights into fashion and clothing are highlighted through both historical and contemporary silhouettes by Lanvin, Vionnet, Alexander McQueen, Vivienne Westwood, Raf Simons, Comme des Garçons, etc.

Images courtesy of © Modemuseum Hasselt/Boumediene Belbachir.